Successful Fundraising
On July 19th, Dirk posted an article to the Dot entitled "KDE e.V. Hardware Fundraiser Week". KDE was looking to improve its situation with the bugs.kde.org (BKO) server. And the community certainly answered the call.
There are some fairly obvious points to note here:
* Being a non-profit and open source community, there aren't many days where we conclude, "Wow, we have way too much money right now, how can we stop people from giving?" In fact, there's never such a day.
* That being said, we don't actively push many fundraisers at all. We haven't shown an interest in frequently nagging for donations or fluttering our eyelashes seductively to procure funds from the general public. Although as we speak, Martijn Klingens may or may not be assembling an army of college students with blue polo shirts to go door-to-door with clipboards in hand extolling the virtues and benefits of KDE. I can neither confirm nor deny this rumor I just started.
* It's a fine line between letting our donations page go unnoticed and stale and pushing it too often. Specific requests for tangible and concrete ideas seem more appropriate for us. If anyone doesn't feel like contributing to a general fund, targetted initiatives (such as Dirk's request) are a sensible way to give people more control over their donations.
So, some prelimiary results? Using the ratio of 1 US Dollar = .78 Euro, and for those who want precise conversions historically, I welcome you to modify these numbers based on this page; you're on your own.
Including the previous three months (April through June) for comparison:
April (30 days)16 people gave 357 euro; 22 euro per person, 12 euro per day
May (31 days) 14 people gave 502 euro; 36 euro per person, 16 euro per day
June (30 days) 10 people gave 203 euro; 20 euro per person, 7 euro per day
July 19-31 215 people gave 5249 euro; 25 euro per person, 404 euro per day
Assuming of course that everyone during July 19-31 donated for the fundraiser; probably not the case, but you get the point.
As you can see from the "euro per person" and if someone with more energy than me cranked out standard deviations and variance, I think you'd see that this wasn't a case of a few people inflating the numbers. This was a case of people giving what they felt comfortable, some naturally more and some less. That's reassuring to me. (Although eccentric benefactors and tycoons still welcome).
So, thank you to those that gave to help our bugs.kde.org site, and thank you to those that give donations day after day without a specific initiative. More info should be coming out shortly to update everyone on the results of the server/site upgrade. Great for our developers and end users, bad news for bugs. Who will think of the bugs???
There are some fairly obvious points to note here:
* Being a non-profit and open source community, there aren't many days where we conclude, "Wow, we have way too much money right now, how can we stop people from giving?" In fact, there's never such a day.
* That being said, we don't actively push many fundraisers at all. We haven't shown an interest in frequently nagging for donations or fluttering our eyelashes seductively to procure funds from the general public. Although as we speak, Martijn Klingens may or may not be assembling an army of college students with blue polo shirts to go door-to-door with clipboards in hand extolling the virtues and benefits of KDE. I can neither confirm nor deny this rumor I just started.
* It's a fine line between letting our donations page go unnoticed and stale and pushing it too often. Specific requests for tangible and concrete ideas seem more appropriate for us. If anyone doesn't feel like contributing to a general fund, targetted initiatives (such as Dirk's request) are a sensible way to give people more control over their donations.
So, some prelimiary results? Using the ratio of 1 US Dollar = .78 Euro, and for those who want precise conversions historically, I welcome you to modify these numbers based on this page; you're on your own.
Including the previous three months (April through June) for comparison:
April (30 days)16 people gave 357 euro; 22 euro per person, 12 euro per day
May (31 days) 14 people gave 502 euro; 36 euro per person, 16 euro per day
June (30 days) 10 people gave 203 euro; 20 euro per person, 7 euro per day
July 19-31 215 people gave 5249 euro; 25 euro per person, 404 euro per day
Assuming of course that everyone during July 19-31 donated for the fundraiser; probably not the case, but you get the point.
As you can see from the "euro per person" and if someone with more energy than me cranked out standard deviations and variance, I think you'd see that this wasn't a case of a few people inflating the numbers. This was a case of people giving what they felt comfortable, some naturally more and some less. That's reassuring to me. (Although eccentric benefactors and tycoons still welcome).
So, thank you to those that gave to help our bugs.kde.org site, and thank you to those that give donations day after day without a specific initiative. More info should be coming out shortly to update everyone on the results of the server/site upgrade. Great for our developers and end users, bad news for bugs. Who will think of the bugs???
posted by Wade at
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
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